Jimmy Carter was exactly where he wanted to be at his funeral on Thursday – at a deliberate remove from his fellow presidents. And slightly above them.
When Brian Williams asked Carter on NBC in 2010 about a striking Oval Office photo of him with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and the Bushes, in which Carter had separated himself, he conceded he felt “superior” to the others because of his stellar post-presidency.
The spectacle in Washington on Thursday was extraordinary – a deceased president and a revived president at opposite ends of the moral scale. Here was Carter, the righteous, ascending to heaven, as Donald Trump, the felonious, ascended again to the Oval Office. Carter’s passion for honesty was as ingrained as Trump’s addiction to lying.
Even as Carter was being praised at his state funeral at the National Cathedral for working tirelessly to eradicate diseases around the globe, Trump was hunting for a disease to pin on immigrants to justify sealing the border.
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While the centenarian was heralded for his virtue and monogamous 77-year marriage with Rosalynn, Trump was bracing to be sentenced on his vice – falsifying records to cover up an infidelity with a porn star, conducted while Melania was home taking care of her newborn son.
As Carter was praised for being prescient on climate change, Donald “Drill, Baby, Drill!” Trump maintains his archaic views even as magical neighbourhoods across Los Angeles are being incinerated.
Carter was a genuinely pious man. I saw his joy teaching Sunday school in Plains. “Two Corinthians” Trump treats faith, as he does everything, as a transaction, a ploy to get him where he wants to be.
President Biden shaded Trump by talking in his eulogy about the homespun Carter’s “character, character, character”. But after hiding his own ageing difficulties, Biden is an imperfect messenger on that subject.
The tableau in the first three rows of the nave was mesmerising, a sweet and sulphurous brew of historical grudges, grievances and battle scars, along with some flashes of the unique kinship that comes from being in the most powerful club in the world.
Trump may be buoyed by his win, but in this exclusive club, he was largely narcissist non grata. Karen Pence, not over the little matter of Trump shrugging off acolytes’ threats to hang her husband at the Capitol, iced Trump in the pews. Others appeared to, as well. Hillary, Bill, Kamala, Doug, Joe. And Jill (who was also in Tension City with her seatmate Kamala). Mike Pence turned the other cheek and shook Trump’s hand.
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W has clearly not changed his opinion of Trump since he famously said, after watching his American Carnage inaugural speech, “That was some weird sh*t.” He ignored Trump, who has blamed the younger Bush president for not stopping 9/11 and for the invasion of Iraq, which Trump said “may have been the worst decision” in White House history. But W shook hands with Al Gore, probably still grateful that, unlike Trump with Biden, Gore conceded their whisker-thin election. And W briskly tapped Obama’s stomach, as though they were old D.K.E. brothers meeting again.
Michelle Obama, sick of the whole political scene, didn’t show. Trump, eager to hang with the cool kids, cosied up to Barack. The president-elect regards W, Gore, Hillary, Kamala, Pence, Biden and Carter as losers, but Obama won twice and transcended his party with a personality cult, as Trump did.
For her part, Melania, looking like a Valentino pilgrim, seemed immersed in a world of her own, probably trying to figure out the fastest route out of DC.
It would seem as if the man who sold the presidential yacht, eschewed “Hail to the Chief” as too pompous and washed Ziploc bags to reuse could not have much in common with the flashy King of Gilt.
But Carter and Trump both tended toward the excessive, vain in their own ways; Carter was excessively virtuous, irritating Americans when he was in office with his parsimonious, micromanaging ways and blunt, demoralising truth-telling. Who wants to be ushered into a miasma of malaise? Trump wallows in the artifice Carter disdained, hawking Bibles and perfume. He goes over the top demeaning people, often veering into searing cruelty.
They both prided themselves on being outsiders and breaking norms, and they both were suffused with grievances.
When I went to Plains to interview Carter in 2017, on the occasion of his 93rd birthday, his resentments were on display. He felt ignored and mistreated by his Democratic successors (just as they got annoyed when he did foreign policy freelancing and tossed virtue-signalling darts at them). Carter confessed he didn’t even have Obama’s email. He said his best relationship with a successor was with George HW Bush. He was most bitter that his wife had been left out of a mental health forum for first ladies held by Michelle Obama, when that had been Rosalynn’s special project.
Even though he was renowned for not playing the game of politics, Carter expertly played the game when I interviewed him at his modest home, as he wore a big “JC” belt buckle and showed off the furniture he had built. He was ahead of the curve in saluting Trump, which Republicans and tech executives have now done en masse, even defending him on his hypocritical relationship with evangelicals – perhaps in a bid to get Trump to send him to North Korea on a diplomatic mission.
At a concert for his birthday, he was asked by the pianist if he had a request. “Imagine,” he shot back.
The John Lennon classic was sung by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood at the Washington funeral.
The farmer from Plains always wanted to imagine a world where people lived in peace, treating one another with human decency. If only the Emperor of Chaos could take a cue from that. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times